Here's a few statistics on where travel marketing budget is being diverted and what seems to be working best.
The report comes from Performance Horizon and WBR Digital and provides an overview of the current state of digital travel marketing.
First up is the online travel marketing initiatives that companies believe drive acquisition. Organic search comes out top, followed by email marketing and paid search. Interesting to see that social media is now seen as quite a big driver according to 65%.
And, when it comes to retention, the report reveals email marketing and social media as the top two activities followed by retargeting and organic search.
The report also looks at which online travel marketing channels get the most marketing spend with paid search coming out first for 40% of respondents, followed by email and search engine optimisation.
Although social media is recognised as quite a big driver for customer acquisition, it doesn't seem like a lot of budget is diverted to it with only 7% of respondents ranking it first.
Here's few slides from the online travel marketing report:
(click on image for a larger version).
The report was put together from a relatively small sample, about 80 travel executives with about a third from the hospitality industry and two thirds from companies of 350 employees or more.
The full report can be downloaded here.